Community green is the second of
two pieces of research commissioned by CABE to gauge the state of England?s
urban green space. This study examines the impact of the quality of local green
spaces on the health and wellbeing of people living in six deprived areas.
The study is the first of its kind in
England. There is little research investigating income and race inequalities in
relation to urban green space provision and use. While a lot is already known
about the relationships between income and ethnicity, and income and health, there have been very few studies that look at
how green space, ethnicity or deprivation, and health are related. A handful of
studies have looked at this within the context of urban areas. Few are large
scale. This study fills a significant information gap.
Community green set out to
investigate:
1 How significant the quality of urban
green space is to the health and wellbeing of different socioeconomic and
ethnic communities living in six deprived urban areas of England
2 The impact of varying quality of urban
green space on health and wellbeing in these areas.
The study included a survey of 523 people of
white British (22 per cent of interviewees), Pakistani (22 per cent),
Bangladeshi (17 per cent), black African and African-Caribbean (12 per cent)
and Indian (11 per cent) origin who took part in 45-minute long face-to-face
facilitated interviews in 2009. It focused on six areas in London, the West
Midlands and Greater Manchester, areas chosen because of their high levels of
deprivation and high percentage of black and minority ethnic residents, and
because they contained green spaces of different levels of quality. However, we
found lessons that are applicable to all neighbourhoods, regardless of their
level of material deprivation or size of their minority ethnic population. People
were asked how important their local green spaces are in relation to other
factors in making an area ?a good place to live?. The survey asked people about
their health, their use of green space, the quality of their local green spaces
and how improvements to their local spaces would affect their use, and levels of
physical activity.
- Website : http:///www.openspace.eca.ac.uk/pdf/appendixf/OPENspacewebsite_APPENDIX_F_resource_1.pdf
- Project start : 2008
- Project end : 2010
- Contact Person : Catharine Ward Thompson
- Funding Agency : CABE Space, Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment